Inside the swing change that turned around Orioles prospect Adley Rutschman's impressive 2021

Juan Soto or Cody Bellinger? In picking one, Adley Rutschman got his timing back.

Obscured in the middle of a season in which Adley Rutschman delivered on the hype and solidified himself not only as the Orioles’ top prospect but also in many estimations the No. 1 prospect in all of baseball was a stretch where he didn’t perform like that at all.

Starting in the middle of June through his appearance in the MLB All-Star Futures Game and a bit beyond it, Rutschman was in a bit of a skid when it came to making the kind of contact he wanted – the kind that results in production.

From the beginning of Double-A Bowie’s series against Akron on June 15 through their next five sets, Rutschman hit .238 with a .704 OPS and a pair of home runs. Considering how he began the year – with a .999 OPS and 10 home runs in his first 34 games – that ensuing 28-game stretch brought things back to earth a bit.

That Rutschman turned his season back around and finished as well as he did means he’s spending this offseason at the top of many prospect rankings. On the basis of performance, he should start 2022 at Camden Yards. It’s how he got himself back on track, however, that could help his promise turn to performance in the big leagues.

During that span, Rutschman still had many of the impressive traits that will make him a productive big leaguer. All year long, he showed impeccable plate discipline and strike zone knowledge. His 6.7 percent swinging strike rate was the lowest among Orioles farmhands, and 13th-lowest among qualified high-minors hitters, according to FanGraphs.

But if there’s anything about his swing that Rutschman has seemed to be searching for since joining the Orioles back in 2019 as the top pick from Oregon State, it was how he loads to begin his swing. He broke down all aspects of his swing at the alternate site in 2020, including his load, and this year at Bowie he and the hitting staff took that a step further.

The idea was there are two different schools of thought, with elite examples of each. Juan Soto, the precocious All-Star outfielder with the Washington Nationals, owing to his superlative batting eye and bat speed, allows the ball to travel before catching it deep. Former National League MVP Cody Bellinger of the Los Angeles Dodgers is similarly prolific while being much more aggressive in his swing, starting earlier and attacking the ball out front.

Rutschman gravitated toward the former, which allowed him to control the barrel and match planes with the pitch better. That’s the recipe for harder contact and the kind of elevated batted balls that do damage. It’s unclear exactly when the adjustment took hold, but there’s a steep uptick in production after that month-long skid that indicates something started to click. 

He spent three more weeks in Bowie and had a 1.005 OPS with six home runs in 18 games before making the jump to Triple-A Norfolk. And while it’s hard to parse out the batted ball data from each of those phases of his time in Bowie, Rutschman’s jump to Triple-A featured a better batted ball profile than the whole of his time at Bowie. In Double-A, Rutschman had a 38.1 percent ground ball rate, which dropped to 30.6 percent at Norfolk. His line-drive rate climbed from 17.2 percent to 26.6 percent. And though he hit for less power overall, the better contact profile meant a higher batting average and thus, on-base percentage. (Rutschman walked slightly less at Triple-A than in Bowie). 

All that makes his spike in batting average on balls in play (BABIP) in Norfolk, up to .364, seem like there’s something to it, even in a small sample size.

There aren’t really any analogs for what Rutschman did in terms of his batted ball profile in the big leagues. According to FanGraphs, only three qualified hitters at the major league level had a ground ball rate of 31% or lower in 2022: outfielders Robbie Grossman, Adam Duvall, and Austin Meadows. Somehow, all three posted an identical .772 OPS. But their profiles were a bit more fly-ball heavy than Rutschman. 

Grossman led the group with a 114 wRC+, with Meadows at 113 and Duvall at 103. FanGraphs’ ZIPS projections have Rutschman at 113 for 2022, which is probably a coincidence, but speaks to what the type of contact profile he’s created can provide at the major league level.

The Orioles will hope Rutschman can achieve even more than that, but the work they did on that front illustrates a few things about the direction both he and the organization are going.

For starters, it’s a credit to him that the constant striving for better that he came to the Orioles with is still intact. His low period at Bowie came after a period of time so impressive that it didn’t even really register, but he and hitting coach Ryan Fuller still dug into what was holding him back and addressed it in impressive fashion.

Now, Fuller is the major league co-hitting coach along with Matt Borgschulte, and they’ll be trying to replicate what Rutschman grew into with as many hitters as possible. The swing work is in both of their wheelhouses, but where the Orioles’ minor league emphasis on swing decisions and Borgschulte’s impressive pitch recognition background can pay dividends is getting the rest of the hitters to meld the pervasive idea of hitting the ball hard on a line in the air with the instinctive batter’s eye Rutschman already has.

Reverse-engineering that plate discipline won’t be easy. But if it can be achieved, and more hitters can feel comfortable sitting back for a beat and judging which pitches they can drive the way Rutschman chose to do, the results can be impressive.

Programming note

I can’t thank everyone enough for the support that came with last week’s announcement that I was leaving the Sun. It has made my current (albeit temporary) state of unemployment quite a pleasant one. I will soon have another job that will get my full focus, but the plan going forward will be for 2-3 articles here per week. Launching a side project without beat access during a lockout was probably a bit ambitious. I hope patience isn’t required while navigating it, but if it is, it will be appreciated.